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Closing Time (TV story)
Closing Time 'is the twelfth episode of the sixth series of ''Doctor Who. It was written by Gareth Roberts, directed by Steve Hughes and featured Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, Karen Gillan as Amy Pond and Arthur Darvill as Rory Williams with James Corden as Craig Owens. Overview To be added Synopsis Going on a farewell tour, the Doctor pays a visit to the recently-fathered Craig Owens, who is more than surprised by his visit. Unbeknownst to the Time Lord, there is malevolence happening in an ordinary shop in Colchester; people are disappearing and the electrics keep flickering. Upon further investigation, the Doctor and Craig find the Cybermen at work capturing the missing people and converting them into more Cybermen, sending Cybermats to search and survey the area for people. In spite of not wanting to get involved, the Doctor decides to stop the Cybermen, but his faith in himself dwindles when Craig and his son become targets... Plot A damp evening in Colchester, 2011 - two shop assistants Shona and Kelly clean up before heading home for the night when the lights start flickering. Shona lets Kelly go home while she sorts out the changing rooms. Elsewhere, Craig sees his partner Sophie off for a weekend break and he insists he can manage two days on his own. After she leaves, he's bombarded with calls asking if he needs help; in the midst of a call with his mother, he goes to answer the door and is stunned to be greeted by the Doctor, claiming to be here for a social call. As he promptly turns to leave, he senses something amiss and scrambles into the house. Craig repeatedly tries to get him to be quiet when he barges into one of the upstairs rooms and wakes his infant son, Alfie. At the shop, Shona notices the shadow of a person in the flickering light of one of the changing rooms and lets out a terrified scream when she draws back the curtain to find a Cyberman. The Doctor comforts Craig, clearly exhausted and admittedly not confident in being left to tend to Alfie alone. Craig suspects there's more to the Doctor's visit then he's letting on, presumably something alien, but the Doctor insists that he's merely there on a social call as part of his self-described 'Farewell Tour', stopping in for a visit before going to watch the Alignment of Exodor, an event he only has one chance of getting his TARDIS into. Craig gets concerned when the Doctor gets curious about the flickering lights and he departs, plodding back to the TARDIS telling himself he hasn't got time to get involved. Shortly afterward, however, he winds up with a job at the local shop, Sanderson & Grainger. Craig discovers him there and all but confirms his suspicions that he's in the middle of investigating something dangerous. When pressed for answers, the Doctor admits that he's trying to find the cause of a string of disappearances connecting with the power fluctuations and confides in him privately that he detected a teleport relay being used in the shop, hence his getting employed. Stepping into a lift the Doctor ignores the 'Out of Order' sign of, they accidentally wander into the disguised teleport and are transported to a derelict ship and encounter a Cyberman but the Doctor manages to beam them back and disable their teleport before they're attacked. The Doctor scans the skies for the Cybership but can't get any trace. With the threat the Cybermen pose, he tries to get Craig to take Alfie and go home to protect them from danger but Craig insists he can help and states that the safest place for the pair of them is with him. In the shop, the Doctor asks the woman at the counter, Val, if she's seen anything unusual and she mentions seeing a 'Silver rat' scuttling around. Elsewhere, Craig tries to ask Kelly questions but she assumes he's hitting on her and calls for security guard George. After scanning around for Val's 'silver rat', the Doctor comes and bails him out when Kelly mentions Shona's disappearance in the changing room. Finding traces of Cyber activity in the changing rooms, the Doctor deduces that it's been Cybermats that have been drawing the power from the area and draws a plan to stake out the shop when it shuts and catch it. Craig simply gets frustrated at his crypticness and accuses him of being the reason the Cybermen are here; he insists it's a coincidence and they wind up arguing and Craig storms off to change Alfie's nappy in a huff. As he goes off, the Doctor haphazardly spots Amy and Rory doing shopping off in the distance but hides so they don't see him. A little girl asks Amy for an autograph and the Doctor notices her on a billboard advertising a perfume called Petrichor with the slogan 'For the girl who's tired of waiting'. That evening, the Doctor and Craig hide out in the shop and go scouting for the Cyberman with a butterfly net. They manage to catch one on low power; while George shuts up in the basement, he hears another Cybermat scuttling around. As he goes to investigate, he attacked and killed by a Cyberman. The Doctor runs to his screams and finds his body before he is knocked out by the Cyberman. Craig finds him unconscious and wakes him up. He explains that the chop should have killed him but the arm it used was a spare part, the same old pieces used to convert the missing people and he wonders how, despite damaging the teleport, they managed to get back down so quickly. Returning to Craig's house, the Doctor works on the captured Cybermat while Craig goes out. He hears Alfie crying upstairs and goes to calm him, sonicing his light to show him the true view of the universe. While he's upstairs, the Cybermat comes back online and slithers off in pursuit. The Doctor hears it when it reaches Alfie's room and disables it as he takes Alfie outside, dropping his screwdriver in the process and locking himself out. He tries to phone Craig and warn him as he returns to the house and is attacked by the Cybermat; hearing his cries, the Doctor gets Alfie to safety and lunges through the window, permanently disabling the Cybermat with his screwdriver while Craig holds it down. While dissecting the Cybermat, the Doctor ponders to Craig about how his lifestyle is still putting people in danger while Craig insists that he should stop putting himself down for it. The Doctor muses on how much time he has left, remembering the adage the Silence put to him, "Silence will fall when the question is asked". Before he can admit to Craig that tomorrow is the day he is due to die, he notices he and Alfie are asleep. The following morning, the Doctor takes the repurposed Cybermat back to the shops to scout out the Cybermen; waking up not long afterward, Craig finds a note from him and chases off to catch him. While looking for a secondary teleport system, the Doctor finds a concealed tunnel behind one of the changing room mirrors, finally understanding that they didn't teleport down from a ship in orbit, they climbed up from a crashed ship buried beneath the ground. As he embarks into the ship, Craig arrives at the shop and leaves Alfie with Val so he can help the Doctor, taking a barcode scanner as a 'weapon'. In the ship, the Doctor finds the active Cybermen and offers them the choice to deactivate themselves or he will but is quickly surrounded and restrained. Craig wanders into the ship and tries to get them to release him but he is grabbed by the Cybermen, declared suitable for conversion and placed in the conversion chamber. The Doctor tries to siphon their power with the modified Cybermat but they destroy it and start cleansing Craig of his emotions before they begin the physical conversion process. CCTV from the shop above plays in the ship as Val comforts a crying Alfie. The Cybermen detect increased emotional responses in Craig and the Doctor realises he can still hear Alfie crying and coaxes him back to himself with it. Craig breaks free of the machine and the emotional overload overwhelms the Cybermen's emotional inhibitors, eliciting a forthcoming explosion; he and the Doctor manage to escape the ship's destruction with the teleport in the lift and Craig revels in their victory, declaring that he 'blew Cybermen up with love'. After the loose ends are tied up with the shop, the Doctor disappears; Craig returns home to find the entire house spotless and the window fixed. The Doctor returns, having travelled back in time to fix everything up while they were out and get a glazier to repair the window before Sophie gets back, using up his own time and missing his shot at watching the Alignment of Exodor. Craig still suspects there's something the Doctor needs help with but he insists that where he's going, nobody can help him. When he tells him he's going to America, Craig gives him a stetson and allows him to take a set of four TARDIS-blue envelopes before departing. Sophie returns as he leaves and Craig insists that nothing eventful happened over the weekend. However, their cover is quickly blown by Alfie's first word "Doctor", leaving Craig to explain to a stunned Sophie what really went on. On his return to the TARDIS, the Doctor passes as a group of children and says his farewells to them. At the Lunar University in the 52nd Century, River looks over accounts the children made as adults about the encounter and checks over the date 22/04/11 in her diary. She is interrupted by the arrival of Madame Kovarian and the Silence; Kovarian has her restrained while her people bring in a spacesuit and admits to her that it's now time to serve the purpose she'd engineered her for - murdering the Doctor. River struggles and resists but she is sedated and falls unconscious. When she comes to, she is trapped in the astronaut suit and suspended at the bottom of Lake Silencio in Utah, 2011 - to await the Doctor and ensure his destiny... Cast * The Doctor - Matt Smith * Amy Pond - Karen Gillan * Rory - Arthur Darvill * Craig Owens - James Corden * Sophie - Daisy Haggard * River Song - Alex Kingston * Madame Kovarian - Frances Barber * Shona - Seroca Davis * Kelly - Holli Dempsey * George - Chris Obi * Val - Lynda Baron * Cyberman - Paul Kasey * Voice of the Cybermen - Nicholas Briggs Crew To be added References To be added Story Notes To be added Continuity To be added Home video and audio releases To be added External Links * Official ''Closing Time'' page on '''Doctor Who Website